Will England be hard enough to exploit Australia's soft centre? By Simon Barnes, Chief Sports Writer, at Trent Bridge
A STRANGE thing happened in Nottingham yesterday. Australia inserted the knife and neglected to twist it. They let England off. They did so because there is a softness at the heart of this team. They can win this Test series only by default. It might happen.
They might yet prove to be a better side than England but, by God, they are a worse side than they used to be.
This is a team in decline, there is no mistaking the signs. The outcome of the series depends on the question of whether England have risen higher than Australia have sunk. This is a difficult question indeed, especially when it is considered how high Australia were at their, as it were, perihelion. But they are on their return journey now, moving away from the sun at some pace.
They began the day bowling in perfect batting conditions. Glenn McGrath, the spearhead, was injured again — and the rest of the quick bowlers bowled in the morning as if they were missing Daddy. A proper Australia side keep finding new heroes — this one keep missing old ones.
The trick to bowling when conditions are against you is in discipline. Boring but true. So Australia bowled 18 no-balls before lunch, a feckless waste. Shane Warne, not missing Daddy, broke the opening stand (although not before it had passed the hundred), then Brett Lee bowled Marcus Trescothick with a beauty. The force was with Australia — except that it wasn’t. It was a no-ball. That is a long way beyond feckless, and it is the second time it has happened in the series. Little signs, you see.
Decline of the Australian Empire, yes, but is this decline and fall? That is the question that is keeping us all on the edge of our seats.
So then the cricketing gods, perverse beings even by the standard of sporting deities, decided to spice things up a bit. Let’s chuck a bit of rain at the pitch, and some uncomfortable light and let’s see if that doesn’t swing it back Australia’s way.
It did. The new boy, Shaun Tait, had two wickets in nine balls and Australia were suddenly in control. The knife was inserted, now for the twisting. The next few overs had the unmistakable feeling of an absolutely crucial passage of play. And in the course of it, Australia had Kevin Pietersen caught and bowled and Michael Vaughan caught at backward point. Except that they didn’t.
Both chances were missed. All caught-and-bowled chances are hard, but Michael Kasprowicz gave the impression of someone whose gut instinct was to get out of the way. Matthew Hayden’s drop was a sharp chance, but professional cricketers are supposed to be good at taking such chances. A proper Australia side would have taken both and made inroads into the rest.
So there is a softness, a new softness about Australia. No ducking out of the way of that one. But how much hardness is there about England? And is it enough? There is no point in the opposition making errors if you don’t punish them. You need a real relish for making the error-makers feel bad.
There is no profit in forgiving an unforgivable error. Do you know what intimidated so many teams when they played against the great Australia side? It was the dread of making an error. They knew what would happen if they gave Australia the slightest amount of help and the fear itself led them into error.
No longer. Australian errors gave England the chance to test their own capacity for causing pain. Vaughan was the man to do the knife-twisting, and he managed maybe a half or three-quarter turn.
He moved from 30 to 58 but humiliatingly got himself out to the trundlers of Ricky Ponting, the Australia captain. It was a pretty half-baked tactic of Ponting to bowl himself, so it was even more half-baked (quarter-baked?) of Vaughan. Australia may be softer than they were, but England aren’t as hard as the Australia of old. Ah yes, but are they as hard as the Australia of now? That’s the point, and that’s what every day of this series keeps asking.
It led to a gorgeously cagey final period of this day, with Andrew Flintoff and Pietersen playing under a darkening sky like a pair of habitual truants vying for the part of school swot. Pietersen has managed a quarter-turn of the knife, moving from 14 to 33. A chance for some heroic administration of pain awaits him tomorrow.
Australia have acquired a soft centre; England a hard shell. Both are vulnerable, that is the fascination of the series. Their strengths are closely matched, but so are their weaknesses. The victory will go to the side who best exploit the opposition’s weaknesses and cover up their own.
